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Comment by johnwheeler | Hacker News Reader

Question:

With these "Serverless" frameworks (Zappa, Chalice, Serverless, etc), do you have to redeploy to Lambda every time you want to test your changes during development?

Is there a way to develop locally and get quick feedback?

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I am not sure about the frameworks, but a lambda function is just that, a function. You can easily run your function and pass in an event object (a dict in Python) to test various scenarios. You don't need to deploy to test. Once you are ready you can deploy to lambda without publishing to fully test before publishing live.

Thank you. Are these not meant to render user interfaces and just be for API-style computing?

Correct. That being said, there's nothing stopping you from emitting, say, HTML from such a function. But there's nothing really helping you either.

It's basically function calls in the cloud; a remote procedure call where the remote procedure is executing on their infrastructure.

I'm also guessing there's no session state or cookies?

We'll I guess there wouldn't be without a server. You'd have to use JWT or the like.

Or any server side store, maybe DynamoDB.

the functions are stateless, but you can access S3 and DynamoDB.

I am currently using it for what you could probably call a user interface. My use case is forms stored in S3 served as an iframe which POST via JS to AWS API Gateway that calls lambda to process the form and return the result to the user.

But if you want to emulate the aws gateway + lambda cycle locally it seems like you need a bit of rigging to do this easily, especially if you want to talk to it with your browser.

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